I started in the NHS in 1979 and I was working in administration. I looked around at all these busy nurses and doctors and I wondered: "who looks after them?" I went into HR, into personnel, because I thought that I could help look after them; while they served the patients, I could support them. I did many years in HR and worked my way up. I really enjoyed it but I never felt that much was changing in terms of supporting staff. Over a number of years I looked at trying to change that at an organisational level with well-being programmes and things like that, but it still didn't seem to make much of a difference.

While I was doing this I was really searching and working hard; I studied, I worked full time; I really wanted to do what I could. I didn't pay attention to how I was and my own well-being. I got to a point where I had been promoted; I was very successful; and if anyone had looked at my life, it looked like I was doing very well but I was really feeling not very well at all. Over those years I felt less well as time went on. I went to my doctors and I had three conditions and I had, for the first time, six weeks off work because I couldn't move out of bed. As I was there, I said to myself: "how on earth did it get to this?" That was a wake-up call for me to say: "I can either continue on this trajectory but it's seriously not looking good, or I can look at this from another way" so I started to explore that. This time rather than explore it about staff and well-being programs I explored it from my perspective.

When I met Serge Benhayon at one of the very early workshops I went to, he said "unless you are caring for yourself, you do not have the capacity to care for others; you could question the quality of the service that you offer." A light bulb came on for me then because I realised that I kept looking outside for solutions; I kept looking for the latest fad in exercise, the latest herbal pill, whatever it was. The main thing I didn't do was: I didn't ask my physical body "what do you need?" I was sitting in the best barometer I could have been sitting in and that was my own physical body. I went and had a chat with Serge Benhayon and said "I want to do a study on myself and a number of others to see if there's a way of learning to take care of ourselves in the busy world that we live in, particularly in health services where we offer our services to others." I started this study, which was really a question to say: "is it possible to develop self-care at work and what is the effect? Where do you start?" I found that a lot of people I spoke to were too tired and knew it was a no-brainer. There's no one I've met in the last few years who says "self-care doesn't make sense." Underlying the study was the personal responsibility that I feel is lacking in all health and well-being strategies and all managed approaches to sickness absence that we've tried in the health service. Unless you choose to commit to a dedication or personal responsibility and unless you choose at times to see the ill-grace of your habits things don't necessarily change.

I looked at a lot of the professional codes of conduct and standards of practice, particularly for leaders and managers, and I found very little, if any, that mentioned the importance of physical and physiological well-being and that it could affect the quality of services. For everyone in our healthcare organisations, somewhere in the job description it could say "take care of your own health and well-being." Somewhere in your objectives, particularly if you're a leader, have one objective that says "take care of your own health and well-being" and make sure there's a focus on that. A lot of people, when I started talking about self care, would say "I don't have a choice; I'm really busy; I've got a hundred objectives; my boss is really hard on me; everybody's watching me; whatever else it was" but everybody found that they had more choice than they realised which was really empowering. The final thing I would say about the study is – an outcome that I hadn't realised would happen – everybody's sense of worth grew deeper. At the beginning, and I can only speak for myself, I was lacking in self-worth but when I started taking care of myself over six years and I learned the things that worked for me – which is still work in progress, every day – my self-confidence and my feeling of worth has grown enormously through that. I realised that I do matter and that I can offer services of a better quality in this way.